PLATO V terminal, via Wikipedia . In 1960, a team at the University of Illinois released the first version of their PLATO “computerized instruction system,” a network of what would eventually be thousands of computer terminals connected to large mainframe computers. Users of PLATO could use the system to learn about various topics, with courses on subjects such as chemistry, math, music, and foreign languages. The first iteration of PLATO used a simple TV screen for a terminal display, bu...

My old boss Alan used to append -ificate to anything he processed. Test script? No, it’s testificate . Build script? No, it’s buildificate . I have embraced this wholeheartedly in everything I do, from naming Minecraft structures, to writing scripts. Much to the chargrinification of people around me. Thanks for reading me blogificate this morning. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-08. My old boss Alan used to append -ificate to anything he processed. T...

I've had lots of hobbies over the years. To name a few off the top of my head, there's been fish keeping , guitar, harmonica, fountain pens, watches, motorbikes, this blog, web development, 3D printing, tattoos, digital minimalism, table tennis, and many more. Some of my hobbies have stuck, but I've never gotten so enthralled into a hobby that I become obsessed. Instead, there's generally 4 steps in the process: I decide I want to take up a hobby. I read, watch videos, and obsessive...

Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] . In this post I want to provide examples of some simple uses of Monte Carlo simulations. We'll start with the classical example of calculating the value of \pi by throwing darts. Estimating pi ...

Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order 1 , stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word on the last page. That’s how you read a newspaper article, or a poem, or an email. Why would reading code be any different? Why code is different English text is designed to be read in order. In fact, there are almost no constraints on the order of a text aside from how you want the reader to consume it. In writing this post, I co...

In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied : we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifecycle. I don’t know what was on their mind, but their post immediately made me think of the classic 1956 movie Forbidden Planet. Plenty of sci-fi, and other literature, have explored humans creating technology with uninten...

The Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram on the Moon, imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30, 2023. Image: ISRO On August 23, 2023 at 12:33 UTC, India’s robotic Chandrayaan 3 robotic lander completed the 19 minutes of its nerve-wracking autonomous descent to the Moon. In one piece and upright, it now lay near the lunar south pole at the coordinates 69.37°S, 32.32°E . The triumphant touchdown made India only the fourth nation to achieve the feat of a soft lunar landing, following the...

When working with floats, we tend to reuse the more familiar integer arithmetic patterns. More specifically, we always try to prevent a disaster rather than reacting to it. I keep noticing this pattern over and over again, and seeing that LLMs still get it wrong most of the time means that, either I am wrong, or everyone else is; it's obviously the latter, and I'm going to explain why. Integer arithmetic safety I wrote before about the issue with checking the result of integer arithmetic a...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Save and restore tab groups You can save the current set of open tabs as a named group and restore it later with Save Tab Group ( CmdTabGroupSave ) and Restore Tab Group in the Ctrl + k command palette. Saved groups are stored in the TabGroups advanced setting ( #4402 ). Highlight matches in filtered Table of Contents When you filter the Table of Contents / bookmarks tree, the matching text is highligh...

As previously promised , here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 . The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year ago , and was priced at $1/million input and $5/million output - relatively expensive even back then, and a full 10x the price of OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna , released last month. The new Haiku exactly matches the price of GPT-6 Luna - $0.10/$0.50 - up to 100,000 tokens. Beyond 100,000 tokens the price increases 5...

About 23,800 people worked at PayPal at the end of 2025, against about 24,400 a year earlier, according to its annual filings. A new CEO, a strategic reorganization and job cuts in San Jose and Ireland have followed. This guide to PayPal employee statistics covers headcount, 2026 layoffs, regional split, median pay, quarterly spending and workforce diversity, drawn from SEC filings and company reports. PayPal Employee Statistics 23,800 Global employees at December 31, 2025, the latest fi...

I wrote the post below last week. That was a quaint and quiet time. Last night OpenAI released a treasure trove of 722 manuscripts solving 372 major open problems in mathematics including from theoretical computer science: A proof of the unique games conjecture  (formalized in Lean) A full derandomization of randomized log space Matrix multiplication in \(n^{2.25+\epsilon}\) time  (formalized in Lean) And many many more. I had Claude put together a webpage to make it easier to explore ...

More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code . With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP support via Codemode which in some ways is a long time coming, but then also maybe somewhat surprising to some. So I want to share some updated thoughts on this blog on what this all means. What Are Tools Wh...

Map of golden mussel observations through time. Data sources: CDFW and iNaturalist Since its initial appearance in California in October 2024, the golden mussel, Limnoperna fortunei , has accomplished Big Things. These little mussels, native to the Pearl River Delta in China, have taken off from their initial foothold in Stockton to spread all the way south to San Diego, and have been spreading northward as well in recent months. It has been an extreme couple years for CA invasion scie...

A few months ago I set out to learn how program verification works. I tried Lean and Dafny , but kept wondering how verification actually worked. To find out, DeepSeek and I built Frml , which is a very simple imperative language with its own verifier. This post walks through the Frml verification engine, explaining how a Frml program becomes Boolean logic that the Z3 solver can check, and what Z3 does with that logic. The language and its verifier are layered: the scalar level handles...

This is a long-form written guide for the fight AAC Heavyweight M1 (Savage) in the game Final Fantasy 14, where the challenger and their seven friends fight the Elezen succubus Vamp Fatale. You may call this the XeBin guide in party finder listings. If you want to experience this fight, don't read this guide. This guide is based off of the Toxic Friends raidplan, the Hector Lectures strategies used by North America Party Finder raiding culture, and insights I have gained from running t...

The Firefox team just launched a website that allows users to rank the Interop 2027 proposals that they care about. And I care about things - for selfish reasons and for work. And that's a challenge. I want to rank things that only benefit me and my blog but I also want to rank things that would make my daily job easier. Or, at least, allow me to delete a lot of code. So I settled with a balance of five for each. My final ranking: CSS random() function CSS corner-shape property C...

On the morning of September 11, 2026, Dor Minzer received a text message from a friend asking whether he was close to settling one of the most famous open questions in theoretical computer science. Minzer, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading expert on the “unique games” conjecture, initially thought it was a joke. Then more messages started coming in… Source On the morning of September 11, 2026, Dor Minzer received a text message from a friend asking w...

I write a lot about data parallelism. About how our processors have special instructions that can do several operations at once. They are often critical to get the best performance out of a CPU. Compilers are sometimes able to take advantage of these instructions. But it is hard to tell when it will work. For Java programmers, you can write directly for data parallelism since JDK 16. With enough skill, you might multiply the performance of a few key functions. The Vector API is in the inc...

On Git Refs Oct 7, 2026 I have recently improved my mental model of Git. Consider these two git commands: $ git fetch origin master $ git switch -c my-feature origin/master Do you understand why is it origin master in one command, and origin/master in the other? I didn’t, until a few weeks ago! My understanding was that git is a content-addressable database. Git stores commits, a commit is identified by the hash of its content, and the content of a commit is, prim...

What's up on the smolweb? September 2026 roundup 2026-10-05 17:00 Autumn is here, the AI slop tide keeps rising on the big web, and the smolweb responds by growing quietly but noticeably. Here is a roundup of what happened on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol in September 2026. Geminispace approaching 3,600 active capsules The Lupa crawler (Stephane Bortzmeyer's Geminispace survey) currently lists 5,215 known capsules , with 3,567 recently connected (page upda...

Frozen light yellow clouds hover under a grey sky, illuminated by the horizon sun. ⁂ ⁂ ⁂ “I have never seen the sky like that before”, I thought to myself while gazing with my whole mind and body in wonder. Fluffy yellow clouds under grey clouds? The colours of the sky have a certain magnetism. When I first notice the colours change for morning or night, I love to stop and look out the window, to appreciate everything that I can see: the gradient from the blue above through the ...

My blog began as a blosxom (Perl) site running on a VPS. In 2011 I moved to the new GitHub Pages , with the site generated statically by Jekyll (Ruby) on a GitHub server. It was a no-brainer: easier, faster, and cheaper, better in every way. After 15 years of Jekyll, and spurred by a post on m4 , this week I replaced it with a new, custom-built static site generator , dubbed ssg , in “C with templates” C++20. The ~8KLoC source closely follows my personal coding style including tem...